“It’s a failure for Putin”
Two years ago, when Putin’s special operation in Ukraine began, the regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia were “accepted into the Russian Federation”. Does this forced Russification of Ukrainian territories mean that they were conquered? The writer and former French officer, Guillaume Ancel, disputes this.
If the Russian president has made the annexation of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia official, does this mean that these territories are fully integrated into the Russian Federation? “Absolutely not,” declares Guillaume Ancel in an interview with La Dépêche. The former officer is clear on the matter: “It's a measure that was imposed by Vladimir Putin. A legalization of his coup de force on a part of Donbass, which is accepted only by himself. Internationally, no leader recognizes these regions as Russian and these territories remain a theater of war. Putin wanted to once again try the maneuver he had successfully carried out for Crimea in 2014. But this time, he failed.”
But what's happening to these regions? Where is the fighting? According to Guillaume Ancel, it's precisely because these regions are still at war that “it's a failure for Moscow. We could say, that in 2014, even if the subject is contested, Russia had taken possession of Crimea. The territory had been integrated, there was a Russian administration set up and a sort of normalization. We even remember that some politicians in our country, I'm thinking in particular of Marine Le Pen or Philippe de Villiers, had recognized this annexation. Here, in Donbass, this is absolutely not the case. I think Putin hoped that Ukraine would give in at some point, but that didn't happen. As long as these territories are at war, no one can change their legal status since this status remains disputed”.
And regarding the Ukrainian resistance in these territories, Guillaume Ancel added that it's indeed present but not “massive”. “Obviously, it's not possible for Ukrainians to demonstrate in the street or express their opposition to the Russian presence publicly. In truth, it's very difficult to know what the population thinks. There's a whole section of these inhabitants who have fled.”
(MH with Manon Pierre - Source: La Dépêche - Picture: Picture by tatarstan.ru via WikiCommons under licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International)